‘Freethought Caucus’ looks like anything but

Lest we think Congressional Democrats had gone quiet since Republicans were passing their agenda anyway, there are a few Congressional Democrats yearning to take the total depravity spotlight back.

To their credit, they know that the nerd prom, featuring progressive hyena Michelle Wolf — while an undeniably ghoulish attempt to brown-nose the demon world – is not the stuff of a permanent revolution. Democrats have been reduced to small ball, like hyperventilating over the latest leaks from the Mueller probe or turning ambulance-chasing lawyers whose names will be forgotten a year from now into cable news superstars. That simply won’t do when your goal is to burn American exceptionalism to the ground.

Hell demands more. Time to think bigger. Time to kill God.

Queue Democratic Reps. Jared Huffman and Jerry McNerney of California, Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Dan Kildee of Michigan, who have initiated the Congressional Freethought Caucus in order to advance the cause of atheists.

Finally: a renewed focus on making progressivism’s main thing the main thing again. Sure, fever dreams about impeaching Trump are fun and all, but ultimately they’re just a distraction from impeaching the imaginary spaghetti monster in the sky.

This “will help spark an open dialogue about science and reason-based policy solutions, and the importance of defending the secular character of our government,” Huffman said. “There currently is no forum focused on these important issues.”

I know. Government AND the media AND Hollywood AND public education AND universities AND even many churches have been so darned reverential and even-handed about the things of heaven up until this point. It’s sickening, really, the relentless holiness of those places. Won’t anybody get full-time busy hating that which we claim not to believe in?

Because that’s what grown-ups do – grown-ups like Richard Painter, who while not yet an official member of the atheist caucus, announced this week that he is a member in spirit. He also announced that he will run for Al Franken’s former Senate seat as a Democrat, after once serving as President George W. Bush’s ethics chief.

“We’ve had for decades a departure from the fundamental values of the Republican Party and from America.”

And who am I to argue with that? He’s actually right, but for none of the reasons he thinks he is. Because he thinks he’s getting closer to the fundamentals of the Republican Party by switching to a tribe that thinks pronoun and bathroom wars are the final frontier.

“Freethought” indeed. As in free of any thought altogether — if “thought” is synonymous with sanity, integrity, and intellectual honesty. For nothing says “ethics” like looking at an enterprise such as the Democrat Party, driven for decades by Planned Parenthood’s bloodlust, and thinking “home sweet home.”

Painter is just the latest Bush loyalist to show us his main concern with the rise of Trump isn’t the president’s well-documented character concerns but rather that Trump might do some of the conservative stuff he promised on the campaign trail. Otherwise, if virtue were your driving passion, you wouldn’t transition to a party whose last standard-bearer was a rape-enabling crook.

So even though the GOP is doing a pretty bang-up job on its own of sending God into exile, the professionals at that game know the Democrat Party is the place to be. That’s where you get to talk about ethics in the very same breath you attempt to kill the only reliable source from which any ethics worth having can be consistently gleaned.